My apologies for the lack of any updates on this front. Things have been crazy busy with the move and the new job and this just dropped off my radar for reasons I'll now share. It is with mixed feelings that I can say that the book has been killed. I'm mostly relieved about it but it's still a little sad. To understand why it was killed, you need to know a bit about its history.
I was brought on the book about 1.5 years after it started. That's right 18 months. The publisher wasn't too happy with the state of things so I was brought in to help. Eventually because of some political stuff I won't get into here, I was bumped to primary author and a new coauthor brought on board. That author dropped off because of overcomitment with work issues. Throughout all this the publisher was getting increasingly nervous about the book's viability. While myself and my editor believed there is a decent market for the book, the publisher kept asking us to get a feel for its marketability. My own interest in the project was waning since I never really signed on to be the primary author anyway and I was getting nervous about the publisher. We might convince him now to let us finish the book, but what if he decided to pull the plug just before it goes to print?

So with all that swirling around, I had a number of conversations with my editor (and she with the publisher) and decided that no one was passionate enough about the book to take the risk to finish the work only to have it killed at the last minute. So it was mutually decided to kill the project. So while it's sad to have put so much work on the project only to have it killed, it was an enormous (and ultimately unwanted) load off my back.

I still maintain the ownership of the manuscript (the parts I wrote at least) so I can release some of it. While I feel like I own most if not all of the current text, some of it comes from "editing" (basically rewriting as it turns out) the text. Still, though, in the interests of not upsetting the apple cart, so to speak, I probably won't be releasing those portions of the manuscript. However, there are a few chapters that are completely mine so I'll try to release those soon. Primarily, I'm thinking of the chapter on iReport here. These are rough, unedited first drafts so they likely won't be as pretty as a published book, but hopefully they'll be helpful.

So that's the short version of a long and tortured tale. My apologies to those waiting anxiously for its release but it's just not going to happen.

Thanks to all those who replied.Â The survey convinced the publisher that there was indeed sufficient interest, so we'll keep plugging away on the book.Â We're having to do a little restructuring due to some logistic issues on the back end, but we hope to have the book finished by December, to print by January, and on shelves by JavaOne.Â Of course, those are "just deadlines" and things like this tend to slip, but we're going to give it our best shot.Â Thanks again to all who replied.Â Check back here and on Manning's site as the day approaches for updates.